Listen Up! Best Music of the Millennium … So Far

In a decade fueled by hyperconsumption and paranoia, some musicians stood out by balancing cultural relevance, technological innovation and raw lyrical and sonic power.

These artists and their recordings — the best of the millennium so far — significantly upped the ante in their respective genres of rock, pop, hip-hop and beyond (usually by obliterating those labels). These musicians’ beautiful noise will only grow louder as the next decade unfurls.

Listen to top tracks by the standard-bearers below, then let us know your choices for the ’00s finest music in the comments section.

It’s apropos that El-P is pictured above in front of what looks like a lie detector, because he’s rock and hip-hop’s eminent truth-teller. His apocalyptic twin missiles Fantastic Damage and I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead may have flown beneath hip-hop’s hopelessly distracted mainstream, but that’s only because their personal and political pain was too much to bear for hearts and minds that sold their souls to the twin hallucinations of reality TV and the war on terror.

Songs on both efforts mashed the political and cultural madness of the decade with sci-fi standouts like Star Trek, THX-1138 and Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer (in “Deep Space 9mm” at right). El-P’s labyrinthine rhymes were backed by beats fed through two Technics, an Ensoniq sampling keyboard, one Vestax mixer, a Korg Chaoss Pad and more comparatively lo-fi recording tech.

His profile escalated sharply on I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, in the form of a kinetic beat upgrade and cameos from Trent Reznor (in “Flyentology” at right), Cat Power and other all-stars. But even that abrasive classic unsettled more soma-sniffing hip-hop heads than it awakened upon its release in 2007.

“I’m more interested in saying something that will mean something,” the former Company Flow member told Wired.com. The group’s stunning debut Funcrusher Plus was reissued earlier this year. “My solo work made sense of the inevitable Third World War. Which is why I ended up bringing more of who I was into the picture, and became more influenced by matters of the heart and head.”In the end, it was El-P’s decision to abandon the music industry and form the respected indie label Definitive Jux in 1999, setting the stage for his brilliant bow as the finest hip-hop artist of the ’00s. From its slew of releases from intelligent, talented hip-hop artists like RJD2, Aesop Rock, Mr. Lif and Rob Sonic to team-ups with television tastemakers like Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, Def Jux turned out some of the most potent artistic work of the ’00s.

Through it all, El-P churned out the best hip-hop of our still-new millennium, and raised the stakes for electronic music speaking truth to power and paranoia. Tell a friend.

Sleater-Kinney: All Hands on the Bad One (2000), One Beat (2002), The Woods (2004)

Although this conscientious Pacific Northwest power trio went on indefinite hiatus after lobbing The Woods‘ deafening truth bomb on our blitzkrieged global village, you can still feel that record’s reverberations from every corner of the globe. It was a splendidly noisy, invested affair, shot through with scathing riffage (listen to “Entertainment,” below) and wrenching human heartbreak (listen to “Jumpers,” below that). If Neil Young was right that it’s better to burn out than fade away, Sleater-Kinney’s swan-song incineration was a kiss-off for the ages.

What’s crazy is that few saw it coming. After the defiant All Hands on the Bad One found guitarists and vocalists Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein and incendiary drummer Janet Weiss at the top of their musical game, it seemed like there was nowhere to go but down. But when Sleater-Kinney’s fiercely political post-9/11 full-length One Beat arrived with a horrific scream, it quickly became clear that the trio’s best work was yet to come. And once The Woods came into earshot, there was nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide.

Rest in peace, Sleater-Kinney. Unless you want to awaken and return, at any time. That would be fine too. Really. Rock so sucks without you.

Autolux: Future Perfect (2004)

This Los Angeles-based power trio’s influences range from James Joyce and The Who to Jimi Hendrix and My Bloody Valentine, but its deafening machine music decodes like pure pop brilliance. And while it has only released one full-length this decade, Future Perfect remains a masterful demolition of the sonic envelope.

LISTEN: “HERE COMES EVERYBODY” BY AUTOLUX

Which should be the point of musical art in the first place, Autolux drummer Carla Azar told Wired.com earlier this year. Influences are fine, she said, until you start hiding behind them.

“Music has become too referential,” Azar said. “Artists like Hendrix were trying to find new paths, but that era is going away. Artists today don’t really have their own identities, because they give too much of themselves away. I love being on the edge in my work. I love feeling like I’ve accomplished something.”

LISTEN: “ANGRY CANDY” BY AUTOLUX

That list of accomplishments should extend into the next decade, starting with Autolux’s second full-length, Transit Transit, in 2010. But if it doesn’t, at least the band knows that — while it might have left only a single release behind in the ’00s — it was almost better than everything else produced that decade.

DJ Shadow’s most notable release — the record-setting, samples-only, instrumental hip-hop classic Endtroducing — dropped in the ’90s. Which means that his wide-ranging sophomore stunner had no chance of competing with Endtroducing‘s epochal rep.

But it should have. From the dark cinema of “Fixed Income” and psychedelic “Six Days” to the deconstructed funk of “Monosylabik” and “Walkie Talkie” (at right), Private Press was a mind-wipe. Plus, it was a concept album about sound recording, sandwiched by vinyl love letters from the past. Bonus points for beats and brains alike.

Beyond Private Press and its clumsy follow-up The Outsider, DJ Shadow cemented his legacy in the ’00s by going viral, whether as an avatar in DJ Hero or as one of the first artists to capitalize on the internet for independence.

“It seems difficult for any artist to feel like they’re making an impact in this environment,” DJ Shadow told Wired.com in August after becoming Universal’s first musician to license an entire digital and physical catalog for sale through an artist-run website. “I envy the way Reznor and others pour so much into their sites, to the point they’re practically communicating with their fans on an hourly basis. But I think it’s healthy to remain a bit detached.”

The Sri Lankan musical revolutionary merged hip-hop, dancehall, bhangra, funk and electro with such effortless bravado that she simply captivated the global village. Wired.com’s Angela Watercutter explained M.I.A. ‘s hypnosis skills best in 2007 after catching her live at San Francisco’s Treasure Island Music Festival.

“M.I.A.’s set was actually the eighth of the day on Saturday, and the bass emanating from her speakers was so skull-shaking that I’m still not sure I heard her right,” Watercutter wrote. But “it was her set that really kicked off Day 1 of San Francisco’s indie fest in the Bay. The Sri Lankan-by-way-of-the-U.K. rapper, continuing her love affair with gold spandex, hit the stage full-force and launched in to her new ‘Bamboo Banger,’ effectively getting the crowd to abandon their blankets and falafel and finally throw their hands in the air. M.I.A. (Maya Arulpragasam if you’re nasty) is known for her antics and she did not disappoint. During a set that jumped from oldies (‘Sunshowers’) to current bangers (‘Boyz’), she danced around the stage like a girl on a playground, climbed the rafters and threw a bra made of paper birds’ heads into the appreciative crowd (I can’t make this stuff up).”

For two skinny dudes with six names between them, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala have manufactured a universe worth of labyrinthine art-rock in 10 short years. Once the screaming voice and incendiary guitar of hardcore Texas punk band At the Drive-In — whose 2000 effort Relationship of Command is also one of the finest efforts of the decade — Omar and Cedric broke out of that genre’s straitjacket and freed themselves of boundaries altogether. The result was some of the most challenging, dense and rewarding epic music of the ’00s, delivered by a band of visionary artists who are masters of their individual instruments.

Rodriguez-Lopez is probably, pound for pound, the most talented and electrifying guitar player in rock, a cerebral hybrid of Jimi Hendrix, Alex Lifeson and Carlos Santana capable of annihilating his fretboard on a daily basis. As the group’s chief sonic architect, he’s responsible for not just the labyrinthine rock tomes found on all of The Mars Volta’s releases, but also well over 10 solo efforts released under his name in this decade alone.

Meanwhile, Bixler-Zavala has some of the most diversely powerful pipes since Robert Plant and Black Francis — his voice hop-scotches from punk to rock to funk without losing breath, delivering dizzying lyrics that slipstream between suggestive poetry and naked portrayal like something William S. Burroughs could have written. In addition, the band’s influences vary wildly from esoteric cinema to the art of Storm Thorgerson, who designed mind-warping cover art for The Mars Volta as he has for legends like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. All told, The Mars Volta’s technical and creative artistry faced little real competition in our Auto-Tuned ’00s.

Let’s get this out of the way: Both Andre 3000’s “Hey Ya!” and Big Boi’s “The Way You Move” were played within nanometers of their chart-busting lives after the release of Outkast’s double-album Speakerboxx/The Love Below in 2003. But the payment for that oversaturation has been nearly an entire decade without any original music from what has become one of the greatest hip-hop groups of all time. And no, we’re not counting the soundtrack to the band’s 2006 period film Idlewild.

Which sucks, considering that Outkast walked the tightrope between Parliament-Funkadelic and The Beatles without so much as a light stumble on both critically acclaimed, commercially successful efforts. Stankonia was a deep sci-fi concept album about funk from beyond, one that no doubt made George Clinton turn green with herb-infused envy.

And Speakerboxx? That was Outkast’s White Album, a schizophrenic dose of G-funk and future soul that won ravenous converts among the most lily-white of listeners. Both releases cemented the legacy of the Atlanta hip-hop duo, who have since abandoned the mainstream to a deadening procession of Auto-Tuned pretenders who can’t sing or rap a note without the technical crutches of correction software and industry backing. The sad state of affairs almost makes you want to hear “Hey Ya!” again.

But no, “B.O.B.” (viewable above) will do just fine: What other song in the Top 40 had the catchy chorus “Bombs over Baghdad!” years before Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq? That Stankonia anthem, from its light-speed rhymes to its P-Funk guitar solo, brought hip-hop to life. Meanwhile, Speakerboxx/The Love Below tracks like the cleverly soulful “Roses” (viewable below) merged genre, humor and appropriation in ways that deserve replication, at the very least.

Hip-hop was in great, unclassifiable hands this decade thanks to Outkast, El-P, M.I.A. and DJ Shadow. But it’s slipping so fast that it needs more than these heavyweights to keep it hyper-real. And the sooner hip-hop ditches Auto-Tune, the worst musical development of the decade, the better.

In the ’00s, Mogwai picked up where it left off in the ’90s: Making immortal, mostly instrumental mood anthems hiding behind deliberately nonsensical song titles. The Scottish atmosphere factory’s ’90s efforts like Mogwai Young Team were nearly impossible to match, but the band managed to do just that, with a sonic diversity that comes from five sharp musical minds at the peak of their powers.

“All of us write, so [the sound] depends from song to song,” Mogwai guitarist and vocalist Stuart Brathwaite told Wired.com in 2008. From the epic majesty of Rock Action‘s “2 Rights Make 1 Wrong” to Happy Songs for Happy People‘s pathological “Hunted by a Freak” (viewable in the creepy, probably NSFW video at right), all five Mogwai talents have written like pros.

They’ve also reached out to their fans more than most, whether through the band’s website or their Rock Action label. Now they just have to get on Facebook. Don’t they?

Better than that, they were all made in Crow and Smith’s respective apartments, on personal technology that can make anyone with talent an indie standout.

“It was amazing that we didn’t have to sit around in the studio and watch some dude change the reels,” Pinback’s Smith told Wired.com in October, before the band hit the road. “Computers and software have gotten better since then. But in the beginning we were scared to death that nothing was going to render. We thrashed so many CDs trying to burn the first Pinback album, because we never had backed up a computer before that. It never crossed our minds until we “lost about half that album.”

Named after the doomed philosophical astronaut at the heart of John Carpenter’s cult sci-fi classic Dark Star — the spacesuits for which Crow is wearing in the video for “From Nothing to Nowhere” above — Pinback has consistently produced extensively brilliant material in this darkening decade. From the aforementioned full-lengths to a gripload of EPs and relentless touring, the band has spread Sly Stone’s simple gospel: You can make it if you try, on your own terms and with your own tech.

Radiohead may have set the bar for postmodern music impossibly high in the ’90s with the release of The Bends and OK Computer, but the band continued to be a sonic juggernaut well into the ’00s. That’s mostly thanks to the intricate songcraft on releases like Kid A, Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief. But when the group took the advice of its manager and released its stellar effort In Rainbows online using an payment-optional strategy, it set another standard, this time for the future of digital music.

“We all thought he was barmy,” Radiohead’s Thom Yorke said in 2007 to David Byrne, during an interview for Wired mag. “But it was really good. It released us from something. It wasn’t nihilistic, implying that the music’s not worth anything at all. It was the total opposite. And people took it as it was meant. Maybe that’s just people having a little faith in what we’re doing.”

That faith was justified, given that Radiohead had already been through the music industry’s meat-grinder, and was in a singular position to get away with such a bold maneuver. Out of contract, with its own studios and servers, Radiohead made a play for the uncertain future. And it paid off, in more ways than one.

“In terms of digital income, we’ve made more money out of this record than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together, forever,” Yorke said. “And that’s nuts. It’s partly due to the fact that EMI wasn’t giving us any money for digital sales. All the contracts signed in a certain era have none of that stuff.”

It’s a new era now, and 21st-century artists with much less history and influence are tentatively following Radiohead into the online breach. How it will end for both the major labels and their rosters remains to be determined, but someone had to go first.